Feeding on Dreams

by Ariel Dorfman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $27)

This latest memoir by the Chilean-American author and former Allende adviser resumes the tale of his countless “dislocations” since fleeing Chile, in 1973. Dorfman shuttles among three continents and two languages, adrift in “an eternal victimhood of regret.” The resulting “wrath” may help us “survive in the worst of times,” he admits, “but it cannot help us to live well.” Most trying for this self-styled Odysseus, and the narrative linchpin, is his return to Santiago, in 1990. It is a “mad miasma welcome,” and, for all his travails in exile, he realizes that the “safe space of expatriation” has made his voice “too loud” and presumptuous to “speak Chilean.” It is perhaps inevitable that such a testament to deracination suffers from a certain rootlessness; it opens, for instance, with the return to Chile, but we’re left to fill in for ourselves what Dorfman’s relationship to the country was like before he left it to become an advocate abroad. ♦

Growing up in an apocalyptic cult wasn’t nearly as hard as leaving it.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.